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Bungie pushes back Destiny 2 fix to maintain dev work-life balance

With multiplayer live games like Destiny 2, the pressure to quickly crank out fixes and patches can be strong, especially when something goes awry with the game’s balancing.

Destiny 2 developer Bungie is currently in the midst of one of those balancing issues, but creative director Luke Smith says that the team has decided to delay the fix until late-July for fear of ruining the team’s work-life balance.

His brief comment on how the studio frames it conversations about crunch came during Bungie’s recent charity live stream, as called out by Polygon following the stream.

In this case, Smith says the team had a conversation on if it would be best to take the current in-development “patch off the patch factory more or less and ask a bunch of people to work super long and add this thing in,” says Smith. “We’re having the conversation about 'is it worth doing that or is it better to preserve the work/life balance and ship it later in July?'”

While his on-stream answer offers only a brief look at how Bungie balances crunch and live game development, it’s a similar stance on a smaller scale to Nintendo and its decision to delay Animal Crossing: New Horizons from 2019 to early 2020 to ensure its devs maintain a healthy work-life balance.